If I'm being honest with myself about the demise of Facebook | Survivor 41 continued
and you should be honest with yourself too.
Will you remember where you were that day? Monday, October 4th, 2021. The day the roster of Facebook apps was rendered temporarily offline and your Instagram feed wouldn’t refresh for about six hours? Now we know that when billions of people can’t access the ability to address the masses with a, “Hey guys, popping on her real quick...” we put the flags at half mast.
The turn of events was particularly interesting because the day prior, former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, revealed her identity on 60 minutes, and also aired a lot of alleged dirty laundry about how the company prioritizes disgustingly high profits over morality. Haugen went on record to confirm the suspicion that Facebook sows division through lackluster safeguards against the distribution of misinformation (no doy).
The more damning accusation was that the social media behemoth turned a blind eye to research showing a correlation between their addictive Instagram algorithm and the disastrous mental health outcomes for teen girls. To that I replied internally, with unwavering certainty, Ah yes, only teen girls feel worse looking at Instagram. DEFINITELY not women in their 30s. They would never fall into the trappings of psychological disarray because of what started as a photo sharing application. Definitely not them.
Given the PR crises Facebook was scrambling to rectify, I found it peculiar when less than a day later all the news outlets suddenly flashed updates that Facebook was not just evil, but potentially WORSE: it wasn’t working.
At first, I was riding high on the Schadenfreude of it all. I think it’s Schadenfreude (that distinct feeling of glee when someone else experiences a misfortune) that gets me through most days when I’m feeling particularly unproductive and not yet independently wealthy. But like a perfectly dosed surge of optimism from a morning espresso, the rush can only sustain a person of my stature and mental fortitude for so long.
Mark Zuckerberg is an eternal spring for the “Schad,” as I’m choosing to shorten it now—forgive me brilliant German linguists—because as a Vitamin D deficient tech billionaire who lacks all visible signals of remorse as he forges ahead in a plot to turn society’s brain to worms, he tends to get roasted a lot.
We’re used to these types of glitches being fixed instantaneously, but this outage lingered. An hour went by, then two hours. By the third hour we turned to our default coping mechanism: Twitter memes. That bought us a little more time. By the time the fourth hour ticked by, I had a positively chilling personal revelation.
In my heart, I knew that Instagram was not functional —because I opened it 13 seconds earlier, and 13 seconds earlier than that, etc. But I observed myself from outside my body as I reached for the phone, my thumb navigating to the app icon on its home screen, tap tapping, and then delicately flicking upward while the error message registered anew with each futile twitch. Logic could not overpower the intense muscle memory that had subliminally been burned into my extremities over years of dependency.
By the 5th and 6th hours of the outage, every publication had some version of an article about the inevitable demise of Facebook. The Times click-baited us all with an opinion piece Facebook is Weaker Than We Knew and prophetized the social media giant as being on the downswing of its heroic narrative arc, plunging towards an ultimate demise.
Facebook engineers announced that the cause of the outage was due to “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers.” I am admittedly someone who has proved unable to ever understand what a router does, so this offered no explanation or comfort. But soon after, the suite of apps were functional and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I wasn’t relieved because I WANT to keep spending hours of my life scrolling with glassy eyes and a slackened jaw. I was relieved because what I lack in ability to understand computer parts, I make up for in the ability to understand my own inner parts. I had spent the last six hours taking stock in all the things I would lose if Instagram never again refreshed. Things like ads for clothes manufactured in faraway places that will never fit me, cyst removal videos, visual updates of what Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank is doing, and yes, those fake babies. My sick treasures!
I’m not ready to let go yet.
As an aside: please do not try to explain what a router is to me. I will become narcoleptic and you will become frustrated very quickly.
[UPDATES FROM FIJI]
Continued coverage of SURVIVOR SEASON 41
EPISODE 3: An Abundance of Advantages
The episode opens under the cover of darkness. The Yase tribe has just voted off Voce and Liana is pissed. She gets a little teary about wanting to make big moves and alludes to her tribe holding her back. I support you, Liana! Do something interesting! Please! Liana gets extra upset upon learning that Tiffany has discovered the Beware Advantage and not her. “This could be a million dollar mistake!” Eh, probably not.
The production crew isn’t even trying to hide these advantages anymore. The parcels are now propped up in plain sight which helps move the game along, but also feels a little patronizing, right? I guess “Good job” Tiffany — she needs to board a boat in the middle of the night or will lose a vote at the next tribal.
Over at the Ua camp, Brad the Rancher gets most of the screen time this week as he’s up and at ‘em in the morning remarking how loudly the youths are chatting down by the beach. “KIDS WILL BE KIDS” he says and then we cut to him immediately finding the Beware Advantage. He’ll need to sneak off to the boat later too. Unrelated to his gameplay, Brad looks to me like the output of an assignment to draw a cartoon character named Brad.
Skipping over to Luvu, Sydney is keeping zero secrets as she directly relays to Danny and DeeShawn that Nassir has intentions to vote them out ASAP. It doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot of strategy here, in fact it comes off more —dare I say— flirty? That’s kind of her whole deal though. Blabbing is risky IMO because it could signal to players later that she can’t be trusted, and Nassir is starting to suspect her. I hope he’ll do something clever to clear up his image. Sydney does find the Beware Advantage and will hop on that midnight boat.
Back at Ua, there’s a lot of talk about finding an Immunity Idol and everyone is being pretty coy. JD would literally die to find one and although he suspects Ricard to have it, we learn that Brad (again!) has found it, in the company of Genie. Remember that the only Immunity Idols that have been introduced are the Three-Way Idols that require a member from each tribe to find one and recite the corresponding silly phrase at the next challenge.
Brad needs to try and sneak Broccoli is just a bunch of small trees into pre-challenge banter. He’s pumped, and immediately tells Shan (DUMB!). So now Shan and Genie know that Brad’s packing multiple advantages. Not smart, Brad! They also know Xander has the idol for Yase. Let’s see if they can use this to an advantage later on….
Nightfall arrives and it’s time for the Beware Advantage folks to sneak off to their boats. Everyone seems fairly normal about this, except for Brad who decides to construct a fake sleeping body a la Ferris Bueller, just in case anyone wakes up in the middle of the night to check on him. This is after he’s already told half his tribe that he has the advantage, so it’s all very unnecessary but also very Brad the Rancher.
Tiffany, Sydney, and Brad meet on the secret midnight island to see what’s in store. Of course it’s another “Prisoner’s Advantage” type scenario that keeps being referenced in which players need to weigh individual decisions against positive group outcomes. Each player has a choice: Bring a tarp home to the tribe or steal a vote later. If all choose tarp, they all get tarp. If all choose steal-a-vote, they all lose a vote. If the vote is split, those who opted for the tarp get nothing, and those who opted to steal a vote prevail.
Maybe these riddles would be more fun to watch if it seemed like any of the players were interested in entering some cross-tribe, future alliance-building territory, but no one is going for it! Is it a Covid thing? Did quarantine zap this group’s ability to sharpen a social game? Who knows. Brad’s all for stealing a vote and Sydney isn’t feeling risky and wants to pick tarp.
Tiffany, who is “not loving Sydney’s energy” (classic diss), dances around the idea of making a big move, but ultimately selects a tarp. We learn this because back at camp, Brad gets his steal-a-vote in tree mail while Sydney and Tiffany get nothing.
We head to the Immunity Challenge where Jeff initiates chit chat, giving Brad an opportunity to smoothly deliver the line he should have been rehearsing, but he BOTCHES it. He stammers through some incoherent babble about how “broccoli grows little bunches on small trees.” Oh no, Brad the Rancher. Everyone is confused except for Xander (Ua) who perks up since he has one prong of that Three-Way Immunity too. He works in his line again about butterflies being dead relatives, but no one from Luvu has the third idol/phrase to activate Immunity. Bummer.
The challenge begins and it’s a swim > balance on tightrope > swim to beach > dig with hands > toss some sand bags onto elevated platforms. We’re worried about Tiffany because the balance beam got the best of her last challenge. She redeemed herself this time, and got the chance to shoot Jeff a rude side-eye after he kept shouting about how bad she was previously. I would have done the same. Shut up Jeff!
All three tribes are on the beach tossing those sand bags, but JD keeps trying to do this weird NBA-style layup move which is…not working. Ultimately this costs Ua the challenge while Yase and Luvu win the reward: fruit. They are all on Day 7 of absolutely starving so this is exciting for them, but not thrilling for the viewers.
The Ua losers are lamenting their loss and trying to figure out who’s gonna get the chop. JD leaves to go to the bathroom and comes back with the extra vote advantage he got a few days earlier hanging out of the waistband of his pants. Shantel (Mafia Pastor) is all, “ummm, what’s that?” and he basically says “oops, you caught me.” This I will never understand because the man has pockets on those pants, how can such a mistake be made??
Knowing that both Brad and JD have advantages makes Shantel feel conflicted. So conflicted that she compares the difficult voting decision to that time her parents got divorced and her dad made her choose sides. Dark, Shantel! Unrelated to Shantel’s gameplay, she wears denim overalls WITH a belt. On this I will ponder.
At tribal council, JD launches into a metaphor about trust being crystals. He caps off this monologue with a reminder that he used to be a dork who was bullied for being skinny (ok brag) and found salvation in Survivor. I have doubts but Jeff is pleased as punch about his influence molding young minds. Maybe the spiel worked because Brad the Rancher got the ‘ol dirty boot and never got to use any of the advantages he couldn’t keep secret.
Does this mean someone else has to find the idol and nail the broccoli line? Can we puhleeeease get some REAL drama at camp? All this advantage deciphering is exhausting.